Monthly Archives: January 2010

I have observed pattern of design emerging in various Haskell libraries, for example vty-ui, GlomeTrace, and XMonad. Here is an excerpt from vty-ui’s interface. The snippet is long but simple, and I need all of it to demonstrate my point.

This module models the concept of a GUI widget. It defines a class with a basis of operations on Widgets, and then instantiates a few data types into the class. To facilitate passing around arbitrary widgets instead of specific instances, it provides an AnyWidget class. This Any* class is the tell-tale sign of this antipattern.

When I was using the above interface, I found myself immediately wrapping the results of text, hbox, and the other combinators in AnyWidget. By throwing away the information of exactly what instance of Widget it was I lost nothing, all the same operations were available to me. Astute readers might notice that withAttribute is an exception, because it has a w to the left and to the right of an arrow, so if I pass it a Box, I know I will get a Box back. But I cannot use that knowledge for anything else, so it doesn’t buy me anything.

There is a simpler and more direct way to encode the same thing. Here is the interface I would have written to this library:

I know just from looking at the types that all the code in the module could be converted to this style. Every operation has the exact same assumptions as in the old version, and all the extra guarantees that the old one provided were useless because they were never used as assumptions. Plus, you don’t have to wrap every call to a combinator with AnyWidget. By exposing the constructor for the Widget type, it gives users the same opportunity to make custom Widgets as the class interface gave.

You might be thinking, “but what if somebody else made a widget type which did use the additional assumptions that the separated data types provided, for example,

“Haven’t we just excluded this possibility from the interface?” Turns out that we have not; just replace the instance with a function:

toWidget :: Window -> Widget

See how this is going? Classes become data types, instances become functions. I’m just manually “expanding” what GHC does for you. Of course, the expansion is smaller than the original.

I advocate a direct programming style in Haskell. Advanced type system features have their place, but plain old functions go a long, long way. Functions are the masters of reuse: when you use an advanced feature, you need a yet more advanced feature to abstract over it (think: classes < existential types < universally quantified constraints < unknown). But all you need to abstract over a function is another function.

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Behaviors must be first class — this is a belief I have held for almost my entire tenure as an FRP researcher. The belief originated about two weeks after I learned of FRP, when I wrote my first FRP Arrow and in it tried to write a small game. The process was awkward; not as clean and natural as what I had dreamt of for the paradigm. The awkwardness arose when trying to wrangle a time-varying list of time-varying enemies. I concluded that Arrowized FRP (AFRP) was terrible at managing dynamic collections of behaviors, and therefore that an FRP system needed dynamic collections to be powerful enough to do nontrivial things.

Only half of my conclusion was justified. AFRP is indeed terrible at managing dynamic collections of behaviors. But I never questioned the latter half. It epitomizes what Conal Elliott calls “proof by lack of imagination”: since I couldn’t devise a way to write my game without dynamic collections, there must not be a way.

Conal and the rest of the FRP gang has been discussing the semantic junk in classic FRP. Clearly there is more (or rather, less) to an interactive Behavior than an arbitrary function between two non-interactive ones. This identified, my mind immediately jumped to Arrows. That is what they are for: function-like things that can’t do quite as much as regular functions.

And for some reason — perhaps it is my increased functional maturity — I feel no need for first-class behaviors anymore, no awkwardness for their lack. Programming with them doesn’t feel like the rest of functional programming. It feels too open-ended; i.e. I can say too much in the code without saying it in the type. I feel now like Arrows are a perfect fit for FRP. And fortunately, we already have an efficient AFRP implementation. It’s not a great implementation — there are semantic and operational details that could be improved, but it is something to start from, which is more than I had before.

I don’t blame myself for temporarily believing that we needed first-class behaviors. But I am disappointed in myself for taking so long to question that belief. FRP was my world. I was determined to understand it and to make it a practical alternative to Haskell’s IO. But I ended up blatantly ignoring half of the ongoing research because I didn’t believe it would work. This is not acceptable for a serious researcher.

The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose.
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart.
If you want the truth to stand clearly before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease.— Zen master Sent-ts’an

I am a Haskell module author. Constituting my released modules are those ideas which resisted the least when I opened the text editor. But two of them, data-memocombinators and graphics-drawingcombinators have gained some popularity, and I am feeling rewarded having written them.

Most of my ideas functionalize pieces of Haskell programming that are currently imperatively-minded, as you can see with the two aforementioned. But FRP, a particularly greedy such idea has been stealing my tuits away from the others. I have envisaged functional command lines, package management, event handling, persistence, testing, and probably more that presently slip my mind. This brings me to my first new year’s resolution for 2010: Produce! It’s time to start coding these up instead of letting one very hard problem block the solution of moderately hard ones. Kicking off the year, I rewrote graphics-drawingcombinators to have a stronger semantic foundation, becoming version 1.0.0 (thanks Peaker and sinelaw for egging me on!).

My second resolution addresses an irrational fear I noticed a few days ago. The story begins with Hubris Arts, the game studio my friend Max and I started in July. We released our first game in November. We are in development on our second (codename “R4”) and prototyping our third (codename “Evo”). All of our development so far has been in C# with XNA, for a familiar reason: it was the path of least resistance. But as I prototype Evo I see all my beloved functional design patterns leaping out at me from between the lines of imperative blasphemy. So far the implementation seems a great fit for Haskell, but I am uneasy. Some part of me doesn’t believe that Haskell can do it. Haskell’s role in my life so far has been that of a language for beautiful koans and interesting experiments, but not for Real Software. But why not? My only evidence is my own fear.

Thus the second resolution: Believe in Haskell! I have decided to do Evo in Haskell. It is only by tackling Real Software that a language matures — it may not be ready now, but by doing it anyway, we will make it ready. If we can do it, that will be a wonderful success for the language, perhaps permanently parting us from C# von Neumann’s clutches. If we can’t, at least we’ll have reasons why not — ideas for things to improve — instead of unsupported uneasiness and unconfidence.